


don't delete the kisses

by captainoir



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: F/M, Friends with occasional benefits, andy doesn't want to 'get' the youths, arctic monkeys wrote knee socks for them!, booker is a cunning linguist, david bowie voice modern love, nicky vs english, nile is determined to seduce a depressed frenchman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:20:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26430268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainoir/pseuds/captainoir
Summary: They parted not with a kiss but with a very casual, very platonic fistbump and a sidehug and a see you on the other side, kid.Quynh had guffawed. Nile didn’t speak to her for a week.[Or: Nile attempts seduction.]
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Nile Freeman
Comments: 13
Kudos: 218





	don't delete the kisses

**Author's Note:**

> this nonsense? came out of my sleep deprived mind because the book of nile angst galore fic is currently at 10k and refuses to be written. idk what this is but its something unbeta'd and nonsensical. enjoy,

What is difficult to gauge now, she concludes, is urgency.

Or lack thereof. Whether love has to be fraught with passion and desire for it to be true. And also everything else, ever. She has been dead for far longer than she has been alive and her point of reference is heavily skewed. And yeah, it's been over a century and she is still feeling her way through this thing called immortality - possibly on her hands and knees - in the dark with little to no help in the romance department and the only other person who _shouldacouldawoulda_ is halfway across the world, busy observing days of mourning for the long dead. It’s odd and fetishizing and probably awful that she pictures him in the wilderness, rough and grizzly and bearded and like, finds it so incredibly hot.

Sometimes she resents their closeness. That he understands her beyond the stereotypes, has studied everything - all that is good and ugly and downright annoying about her in their time together as sort- of- friends and lovers and partners. She has always tried to not look to him too much because he is constantly on the move, restless and always a little less contained.

Because even in those early days, she had understood that if she looked at him, _really_ looked at him, lost focus in the constant refrain of why not - it wouldn’t have mattered to her if they were barely friends or partners or friends with benefits in whatever particular time period _because_ and she’d have done something that was - way _way_ stupider yes - but also so fucking -

Anyway, the point is, she wishes she hadn’t because yeah, it always looked so cinematic in the movies and these people had long fucking memories.

But here’s the thing: the last time they had sex, filthy good _sober_ sex, she got blindsided when he announced, during a post op dinner, with the entire guard present, that he planned to set off on a walkabout and go AWOL for like, half a year and then wore his wedding band in a chain around his neck, that much closer to his heart.

They parted not with a kiss but with a very casual, very platonic fistbump and a sidehug and a _see you on the other side, kid._

So there’s that.

Quynh had guffawed. Nile didn’t speak to her for a week.

At least she knows this for sure: he isn’t going to make an honest woman out of her anytime soon. It’s crazy she is even considering it when he is still wearing his grief three hundred years on and counting.

But time is, as they say, relative. And she is unkillable. And forever twenty six.

There’s poetry in there somewhere.

“Just being yourself is enough,” Andy manages to choke out before turning back to her phone, channeling her previous experience of godhood and ignores her. She is a studied version of pictorial maxim, because as Nile has come to learn, there are some conversations she refuses to engage in and this is one of them.

“A guaranteed _charge_ on, she means,” Nicky supplies sagely. Nile has also learned to parse through and edit conversations at lightning speed in real time, in her mind because this is her life now. A guaranteed _turn_ on. She doesn’t correct him. He continues, “Andy Is Not Comfortable With Meddling In Other People’s Sex Lives is a dialect of an archaic language I am fluent in - you’re welcome, Nile. And this extra service is free of charge too. You're welcome again.”

Nile flips through a teen magazine in Italian and wow, way to remind herself of how ancient she is. “Please, can we pretend I’m being sardonic and not like, insecure.”

Nicky scoffs, reading over her shoulder. “Speaking as your elder and someone who has lived through the Renaissance and even, on occasion, inspired great works of art, I can objectively tell you that you’re fall dead gorgeous. You’ve nothing to worry about. And we haven’t even gotten into how happy Sebastian is in your company.”

She mulls it over, recalls the last time they had ripped at each other’s clothes, the way he rushed out the door after the deed was done, and flips another page. “Hmm. At least we know that I am _drop_ dead gorgeous. Thank you Nicky. You know just what to say to make a girl feel so loved.”

“Prego.”

_Ugh._

  
  
  
But honestly, this is the kind of embarrassingly wacky hijinks that wouldn’t have made past the cutting room floor of a shitty hallmark movie.

“Merde,” he says when he opens the door.

So it’s fitting that Joe is standing right behind him, having recovered enough from the shock of seeing her _like this_ to let out, a very loud and deeply felt _ya lahwi_ _,_ both of their gazes glued to the stupid, sheer knee socks.

“Ignore him,” Booker says, and she can tell by his eyes, that he is trying not to laugh, and making her friend with _occasional_ benefits laugh at her attempt at seduction is exactly what she was going for, obviously. “He is senile and out of touch with modernity. Hasn’t learned how to observe social niceties. Like subtlety, for instance.”

She glares at Joe who is wearing a shit eating grin. She glares and ignores the man blocking her vision. It’s a personal catharsis. Her brief career as a marine equipped her with the necessary skills needed to survive in her new line of work and this was one of them. A super powered glare that says she is in complete control of the situation and a bad bitch to boot, try her and not that she is wishing to melt into a puddle right where she stands and like, evaporate.

Joe backs off, shit eating grin intact. “I’m leaving you to it then. Remember to leave room for Jesus,” he says and wiggles his brows, expression so damn gleeful she is glad Booker can’t see because it makes her want to scream and lock herself in her room and apparently she really is regressing to being sixteen in all the possible ways to be sixteen. As if she went a hundred and twenty three years _back_ instead of forward.

 _This is the definitely going to make the top five of your dumbest ideas ever_ , manages to penetrate through the panicky fog and into her rational mind, and well, great. Hindsight might be 20/20 but she has perfected short-sightedness into an actual art form.

She should have stopped to consider the many layers of ridiculous it is that she took relationship advice from a literal teen magazine at a cafe. _How To Keep Him Interested_ , _#Tip 5, Spice Up Your Life_ and what the fuck was that about. God she must be certifiable on every level if the spice girls is the cornerstone of -

Booker leans in closer with his particular brand of louche charm, too close, his hand coming to rest on the door behind her, caging her in, just as she hears the sound of the click at the other end.

She feels his breath ghosts over her ear and his beard scratch at her cheek. It makes her shiver in the Mediterranean summer. His voice is pitched so low, it’s almost drowned out by the click of the lock. “I have really fucking missed you, mon trésor.”

  
  


  
She keeps them on.

“Don't you dare” he warns as she makes an aborted motion to remove them. He sits back and regards her - sprawled naked in his bed, save for the knee socks. So maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. There’s responsibility to be found in recognizing that wisdom can come from anywhere. His hands curl under her to cup her ass, to drag her that much further down the bed. He has her at the edge and this is certainly new. He spreads her legs wider, his gaze switching between her cunt and her face, her breathing the loudest thing in the room and if she wasn’t so unbelievably horny, she would have probably found it in herself to be really self-conscious about it. But she is so she doesn’t.

His beard bites at the inside of her thighs; it makes her want to press her legs together and trap him there, the discomfort of it is so good, it complements his mouth on her. He slides two fingers into her - _fuck -_ as he licks and sucks, and she grabs him by the hair. He makes a sound against her, makes her fingers pull harder, nails scratching against his scalp, and he makes that noise again, his own fingers, his mouth, working faster. She kinda never wants him to stop saying _fucking_ in that exact that tone, the same emphasis with which he says her name and to _never_ stop making those noises. Working her the way he works at everything he does, still with that barely contained restlessness. She comes like that, her heel digging into his back, between his shoulder blades, spurring him on, and he doesn’t let up until she tries to squirm away from him.

“You’re so fucking hot,” he says, serious, looking up from between her legs. Her skin feels fevered, his hair still damp across her thigh. There’s no laughter anymore, his gaze unwavering, so intense she has to look away first. He kisses down her legs, tongues at the fabric of her socks and offers his best smile. 

They stay on for the rest of the night. She will consider it weirdly kinky, she will think of what else he will be into and whether he’s into it all or trying to make her feel better about it. She will think they have the rest of forever to figure it out and that it is so worth Joe’s teasing and Quynh’s cackles but, when he lowers his head again, she really doesn’t think at all so

.


End file.
